Emily braced herself when she posted a video of her weiner dog Sprinkles wearing a kippah and posing with a challah earlier this month to celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month.
She wasn’t girding herself for the kind of “cute overload” responses that once littered online posts about adorable animals.
Instead, she was expecting exactly what happened: Her Instagram post quickly drew dozens of antisemitic comments, including one user who wrote “kike” six times and another who commented “HEIL AUSTRIAN PAINTER.”
Emily, the Jewish content creator behind “Sprinkles the Weenie,” an account with 240,000 followers that chronicles her dog’s life, said she had come to expect that kind of response whenever she posts Jewish content of Sprinkles online.
'Never surprised'
“I’ve been posting Jewish content for years. I’m never surprised,” said Emily, who requested anonymity because she does not publicly post her full name. “Part of being a Jewish content creator, you’re opening yourself up to, you know, there’s a lot of ignorance out there.”
While many Jewish content creators, including Jewish children’s music creator Ms. Sara, drew a similar flood of antisemitic comments this month, the backlash was hardly limited to Jewish accounts.
“F–ck Israel and f–ck Jews,” wrote one user on an Instagram post featuring President Donald Trump’s statement commemorating Jewish American Heritage month.
“Jews are the most vile & evil creatures that has ever existed. 🖕🖕🖕🖕🔥🔥,” wrote another user on a post by “Sesame Street” featuring Jewish actress Kat Graham and the puppet Abby Cadabby commemorating the month.
“F–ck all these motherfu***** j**ish artists and f–ck u too,” wrote a user on a post by the Grammys honoring Jewish American “artists, producers, and innovators who helped shape the sound of music as we know it.”
The comments were not isolated examples. According to an analysis of 537 “high-visibility” posts about Jewish American Heritage Month by the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, a nonprofit that monitors and fights antisemitism, 33% of the comments on them were either antisemitic or “hostile.”
Among the hateful comments analyzed by the group, 45% were “direct hate speech,” including comments praising Hitler or accusing Jews of being “satanic,” while another 21% consisted of anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian “deflections” on otherwise apolitical posts, according to Steven Fransblow, the chief data and technology officer at the Blue Square Alliance.
“The original poster could be ‘Sesame’ Street, could be a political group, could be a politician themselves, or any other group. They could be posting [something] that’s quite supportive, but then you get down to the comments, and it becomes very hostile very quickly,” Fransblow said.
Israel has been an online third rail for years. But Fransblow said the spate of antisemitic comments on seemingly “innocuous” posts commemorating this year’s Jewish American Heritage Month has added to what his group has flagged as a growing trend: mainstream social media comment sections becoming flooded with anti-Jewish rhetoric, even on posts unrelated to Israel.
The same trend appeared around Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Fransblow said. For the first time this year, the Blue Square Alliance’s analysis of Yom Hashoah posts found that comments denying or distorting the Holocaust outnumbered those that commemorated the day by two to one.
Fransblow said his group had indications that the phenomenon has chilled posts in support of Jewish communities, a powerful form of representation at a time of rising antisemitism. He said the Blue Square Alliance, which was founded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, had been working to engage with “sports clubs and partners” that said they stopped posting about Jewish holidays because of “fear and their expectation of this type of reaction and comments.”
Fransblow said the hostility has consequences beyond the comment section. “It raises our concern, because this, again, is something that the average American is going to see versus folks that are just in that ecosystem of a hateful bubble because they’re following hateful accounts,” he said. “This is now coming into more and more of the mainstream.”
The Blue Square Alliance was not alone in noticing the surge of antisemitic comments on Jewish American Heritage Month posts.
In a post on Instagram, the Jewish creator behind the account “Sleepy Librarian” posted a carousel of comments left on Penguin Random House’s Jewish American Heritage Month post, including “Mossad campaign” and “I’d rather be antisemite than an anti-human.”
'Expected at this point'
“Antisemitism? During Jewish American Heritage Month? Groundbreaking,” the creator behind the account, Eytan Kessler, wrote in the caption. “I am not surprised by the comments under the Penguin Random House JAHM post; it’s expected at this point. It’s just exhausting to see it every year.”
In another post on Instagram addressing the trend, Rachel Steinhardt, who runs the account “yidlitkidlet,” urged organizations whose posts had drawn antisemitic comments to “vigilantly delete” them, call them out, or turn off their comment sections altogether.
“If you don’t do these things, it begins to look like you invited the hate speech,” Steinhardt wrote. “If your response is to stop posting content because it’s too much trouble, well, you’re lazy and not a true ally. But it’s preferable to leaving the hate speech to fester on your page.”
Moderation can have its own effects, as hate speech is removed, but its relics remain in the form of comments rejecting antisemitism or explaining that American Jews should not be seen as all supporting Israel.
Emily said she would not let the barrage of hateful comments change how she posts about Sprinkles. In fact, she said, the opposite was true.
“I think it brings me motivation. I’m a descendant of Holocaust survivors, and I think it’s really important to not hide our identity, not hide our culture,” Emily said. “I’m really grateful for the opportunity to spread Jewish joy and make a positive impact on people’s lives.”